MÚSICA A LA CARTE
Bcn's SONAR festival asked me to compile a CD & write a short essay on 'Third World Beats' (problematic terminology, we know) for their 'A La Carte' listening booths & online streaming. ¡Claro que si! [Edit: the streaming is now online] I selected the tunes with Maga Bo. We squeezed 17 tracks on there, most or all of them aren't distributed internationally and are otherwise hard to get ahold of. Kwaito, kuduro, African rap, raï, proto-reggaeton, proibidao funk carioca, Imazighen pop... and a lo-fi recording of Cheb Mami riding a classic reggae riddim, Cuss Cuss:
Cheb Mami - Hatachi(cuss cuss riddim)
while Mami's golden vocals accompany the standard into new territory, Bobby Konders' Massive B put out my favorite Cuss Cuss versions, bonus b-side dubs sampling vintage Malcolm X. Here's one of the hotter vocal cuts. me sit upon the riddim like a lizard on a limb - deep & lazy tropical dread
Burro Banto - Tek A Set(cuss cuss riddim)
my piece to accompany the 'A La Carte' selection begins:
Polyglot Senegalese rappers have MySpace pages; slow techno rules South Africa. Hiphop in 2006 is a a tension between global pop product and D.I.Y expression via hacked technologies and partyrocking. Despite economic marginalization, Third World urban music dances on these contradictions.
at some point the whole text might be online. Other 'A La Carte' selections include: David Toop (Silence) and Philip Sherburne (Dubstep).
NETTLE IN THE U.K.
we've added a 2nd London date to the Nettle tour, which starts this Thursday, yikes! Our last UK tour was with Nass El Ghiwane. We are now 7.3 times better. Abdel Hak (violin, banjo), Jen Jones (electric cello), DJ Rupture (beats, keys).
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We're releasing an album early 2007 but until then, live is the only way to experience it. Nonrepresentative soundbites & info here. all dates with Filastine. .
NETTLE live!!
thur june 1 London. Spitz. w/ Doudou Cissoko (Senegal)
sat june 3 Bristol. Venn Festival
sun june 4 Norwich. Norwich Arts Centre
mon june 5 Leeds. Brudenell Social Club
tues june 6 London. Kemia Bar (Momo)
july 14 Amsterdam. Paradiso. w/ Ryoji Ikeda, Kilamanjaro Dark Jazz Ensemble, more
july 20 Barcelona. CCCB. special show with Khalid Bennaji of Al-Azhar on vocals & guembri.
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The Spitz gig is with Cissoko's trio: kora, double bass, cello. His album's on Sony and I have high expectations for their live show. Venn was a blast last year & its another cool lineup. The 2nd London Nettle gig is free (pricey drinks I believe) but the venue is 100-capacity so come early. doors at 7pm i think, but don't hold me to that...
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plus this Friday June 2nd there'll be a Soot party in London: Dj Rupture, Filastine, Heatwave DJs, Uberdog! Not a bad idea to get tix in advance, 6pounds at the Soul Jazz Broadwick St. shop, Sounds of the Universe, 8pounds at door. Boom boom kick!
(just got back Timeblind's GHOSTIFICATION 12" EP -- sexy future bass on clear vinyl -- we'll have a bunch for sale at the Soot shindig.)
VILLALOBOS CATHEDRAL
Today I'm posting a track by Ricardo Villalobos. "Today I'm posting a track by Ricardo Villalobos." There. We've thought about it.
And it's pretty darn good. Had heard his name for years but Philip Sherburne was the first person whose words got me to listen. Sometimes a thing needs a person to describe it.
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Ricard Villalobos - Ichso(7 min excerpt. from Achso)
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If this song is a landscape then the melody is a balloon wafting through it, distant and central, lonely arc reconfiguring the ground underneath, aleatoric, recently released from someone's hand, now on its own, now pulled by a higher harmony.
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Hangin' out in another corner of the astral plane parking lot we find Vibracathedral Orchestra. Neil Campell & I have been exchanging music for a minute -- I open each package and bristling raw free rock drone gems fall out! Gorgeous cosmic clatter
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Vibracathedral Orchestra - Stole Some Sentimental Jewelry(5 min excerpt. from Tuning to the Rooster)
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IMAZIGHEN pt 5
joyous pop from the Rif mountains
tabla? check. synth stabs? check. vocoder? check. 4/4 breakdowns? check. infectious chorus? check.
IMAZIGHEN pt 4
The cop on acid grips his pistol and stares deep into himself. Guarding the border is boring without hard psychedelics. He starts thinking out loud: "It’s actually tough coming together and celebrating life together (unintelligible) ...that it inspires other people to go off, travel, get creative. So many people are just in a job, frustrated, dreaming. They do the same thing every day like robots and Bill Murray in that movie about groundhogs. The jails are full of Westerners arrested for drugs possession. But that doesn’t mean the authorities are arresting everyone. I'm not arresting everyone. Am I in my uniform? Why have the barbarians chosen me as their speakerperson? "
Imazighen, Imazighen the wind whispers and the cop nods, fingering his gun, longing for home and a bath and dry towels and anything but this dust and boredom and endless stretch of chain-link fence where asteroids fly across his mind, to crater it. I like, he mouths, the asteroids.
Nobody pay attention to the cop. Barbarian, Barbarian.
We're trying to listen. To Fatima and her partner and their vocoder folk-pop first mentioned here:
Berber duo – track 1
& on to a 10min excerpt from a Maghrebi medley cd-r whose artwork is on the goa trance tip.
??? - ???
JUNE SOOT BARCELONA
on Saturday June 17th we're throwing a big Soot party at the Makabra in Barcelona: DJ /rupture, Shitmat (planet-mu, wrongmusic) Filastine, Jahbitat (nosordo/arepa).
1 euro admission (one euro admission!!), a beefy soundsystem, organic beer made in a nearby mountain ecological reserve, VJs, no sponsors, civisme info, the whole works... all in an incredible squatted building complex in Poble Nou during SONAR weekend.
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Tickets for the Soot party in London -- downstairs @ Gramaphone, 60-62 Commercial St. -- on Friday June 2 are now on sale at the highly awesome Soul Jazz shop in Soho, Sounds of the Universe. Rupture, Filastine, Uberdog, Heatwave Djs,,, 9pm - 2am. £6 in advance.
in Ireland at the moment, Cork tonite, Dublin tomorrow, no time for details or hyperlinks but the above events should be lively... see you in the street
TO STEP INTO A BLOG
"kind, black butter, melting and opening underfoot" - Seamus Heaney, Blogland
To step into a blog is to step into suspended life-forms, not to mention the dreamlike stories connecting fairies to the blog and the blog to human sacrifice. The blog is an active, prehistoric force that has at different times spread over great areas of land. Yet the very same life of the blog assumes death together with petrification in its archives. To the outsider, this soggy medium that provides fuel for the discursive fire is a mass of contradictions. In the form of posts, the blog is a cheery, life-maintaining thing, to be sure. Yet as a muddy transmutation of the paper forests that once covered the mediascape, and as the remnant of what the wealthy had otherwise appropriated or drained through centuries, the blog is a poignant sign of destruction, exclusion, and poverty.
ESKIBOY
I SEE THINGS HAPPEN BEFORE THEY GONNA HAPPEN
BUT TEACHING A MAN AINT ENOUGH
the new Wiley album is hot. Relentless, inventive, etc.
Wiley – One Avalanche from Da 2nd Phaze
you can buy it here, and probably should: his CD is basically self-released, which means that most of the money you pay should make it to Wiley himself. Boy Better Know: self-determination is no small thing.
And from a culture industry standpoint: the more copies it sells the more clout this grimey visionary will have when dealing with larger labels— more buying power over our collective imagination. This is my first CD purchase in months (if you discount the Arab CD-rs).
SECOND PERSON
you wake up and say to yourself: i want Neuman microphone recordings of a 270-year old Stradivarius Clemonenfis cello running pizzicato chromatic scales in an anechoic chamber that i can freely use. Bam.
the internet is the genie, but it makes you live inside the bottle too.
you sip your coffee or tea and say: i want hours & hours of grime and dubstep pirate radio recordings. BAM. want, need, wish, waste.
you see yourself on YouTube. Acting a fool. In this homevideo you are surrounded by people you don't know, all singing the words to a pop song about grapefruit. You look much older than you feel.
your uncle calls. He has just seen a large, very tall (> 8 ft) reddish furry creature in rural Illinois, just outside St. Louis. It moved on four legs, with two swinging inward between the other two. It reminded him of a cross between a gorilla and a kangaroo. The spherical head seemed disproportionately small for the creature; and he thought it had two arms in addition to the legs.
He kept on driving, thinking it would appear in the newspapers later. It never did.
URBAN FUNKE FAKE
I am NOT performing at this weekend's Urban Funke Festival in Barcelona --- although they have been using my name and image in the national press to promote it.
DJ
/rupture NO va a pinchar en este finde's Urban Funke Festival en
Barcelona -- aunque los organizadores han estado utilizando su nombre
e imagen en la prensa nacional para promocionarlo.
Needless
to say, I'm pissed off.
I
had been confirmed for months, but last week the organizers told
everyone that the nighttime parties of Urban Funke were canceled. The
corporations running the festival -- Iguapop and Gamerco -- announced
that they had failed to get permission to use the Olympic stadium. Suddenly this week my photograph appears, large, next to De La
Soul's, in a national newspaper saying that we are "confirmed
artists" for the much smaller festival events in
as-yet-to-be-determined new locations around the city. This is
completely untrue.
If any of you have purchased tickets hoping to see me, demand a refund.
LESS THAN ONE THOUSAND
...almost done clearing tracks for a new 'superlegit' Rupture mixtape CD. It'll have material by Wiley, Pressure, Hototogitsu, Dexplicit, Team Shadetek, Kode 9, Para One, Slew Dem, M Sayyid, Neil Campbell, and many other troopers and troubadours. I am a happy soundboy.
The idea of the mix is to use only material by independent do-it-yourself labels, and many of the records I'm using exist only in editions of 1000 or fewer. Hence the title: <1000
belated MayDay / immigrant strike cinema tip: Miracle in Milan (1951). The cheeriest movie about squatter camp eviction you'll ever see.
Awesome Tapes from Africa (thanks baw, thanks nick)
Make Everything Better : SimonSilverdollar returns! Music writing as romance rather than a macho wrestling for control.
"it's going to be me chronicling all the music i hear in a year."
Roque & I are redesigning Mudd Up! - change soon come. In the meantime, you can read Roque on hyphy in the Village Voice:
"Swapping Chronic languor for ecstatic vigor, sonically and chemically, hyphy makes flight from hardscrabble reality the name of the game. Foolishly written off by some as music for the crack generation, this is the addled sound of Bush-era escapism: a rival brand of surreal."
TÄYTEEN
Anybody here know how to get in touch with the 3TB label or the Finnish band Kompostikopla who released their debut 7” on it in 2001? Googleproof it seems. Whenever I put on this record someone from Finland comes running up and hugs me.